DOM FUAS IS DEAD by Jorge de Sena
Dom Fuas is dead. For seven years he was my cat.
Pompous, regal, solemn, almost unapproachable,
displaying a giant angora’s disdainful elegance.
Ash and white, rich in fur,
his tail the plume off a legendary helmet.
Yet, in his time, when he happened
to stop by the house, mainly to feed
or, condescending, to visit us much like
the Duchess of Guermantes receiving Swann,
he had moments of gentleness, when he was all hugs,
which he soon broke off, resuming
his imperial gait, his ducal airs.
In this house he never acknowledged the existence
of any cat but himself. All the others
shrank away as he walked by or
retreated so that he might eat, standing off
at a distance to witness that majesty
which never mewed for anything.
He was sick, one problem after another.
And you could see in his body and his opulent fur,
as in the cast of his head, the humiliation
suffering will inflict upon those of such great pride.
At the last, in the American way, he was admitte
to an animal hospital. Then we learned–
over the telephone–that there, alone, solitary
as any being down here on earth, he had died.
The only change–and it was better that way,
given one’s encircling terror at the thought of being
the animal that dies–
was not seeing him again. Because either we die,
as formerly one died in public,
the whole family or the entire court around us, or
it is better not to see in someone’s face–
even or especially in that of a cat which, alive, was so
proud–
not merely the markings of that death in solitude which one
always dies even though the whole world stands in attendance
but the stamp of that other solitude, technocratic and
hygienic,
which, transposed by the amiable professional
voice of a solicitous secretary, abolishes us.
Dom Fuas, you have died. I shall not say
that the covering earth rests lightly upon you, because
it is more than certain
that you were not given the privilege even
of sleeping forever in the dirt you scratched at
with such artful care to bury over
the feces of existence–
like a well-bred cat, one of nature’s noblemen.
In these years with so much dying about me,
your death also counts. No other cat
will bear your name just as no one of my cats
before you was ever Dom Fuas.
(translated by George Monteiro)
